]]>Next weekend, Pope Francis may release his greatly anticipated response to a key bishops’ meeting on family issues that took place last fall. At that meeting, bishops discussed the church’s response to a host of issues, including some that are very controversial. The bishops were especially divided over whether the church should change its rules against communion for divorced Catholics who have remarried. Many American Catholics have been pushing for that change and others. Correspondent Deborah Potter reported on some of the difficult family issues facing the church.

]]>The Roman Catholic Church’s understanding of the permanent nature of marriage “is really meant to be a countercultural position,” says Professor Susan Ross of Loyola University Chicago’s theology department. “The Church’s challenge is to find a way to hold marriage as this sacred bond, while recognizing the very human situation in which it falls apart.”

]]>“The American post-Enlightenment contractual idea of marriage—that is, marriage is what we decide it is—is an incredibly powerful idea that haunts the minds of American Catholics…The under-65 crowd is much more into contractual understandings of marriage than covenantal understandings of marriage.” Watch more of our interview with Father James Halstead, who teaches a course on marriage at DePaul University in Chicago.

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: When Joseph Reyes, Catholic, and Rebecca Shapiro, Jewish, got married in 2004 they did not think their different religious beliefs would be a problem. They were leaning toward Judaism. The wedding ceremony was Jewish and later Joseph converted. But by this past April they were divorced, with religion playing a major role. Their daughter, Ela, now 4, was at the heart of the dispute.

JOSEPH REYES: Well, the decision was made that we would expose her to each of our respective faiths, and our daughter, Ela, would make her decisions based on what she saw.

ROLLIN: But once you had converted, then wouldn’t you be educating your child as a Jew?

REYES: The whole conversion ceremony was fairly suspect because I was just handed a bunch of books and said, “Read these—or not.”

ROLLIN: So you converted, but you didn’t really mean it.

REYES: Again, it was a cosmetic fix. My then-wife set this whole thing up and all I really did was show up.

ROLLIN: It was clear that Joseph’s conversion had little weight when he had his daughter baptized—secretly. The priest was unaware of the situation.

ROLLIN: Steven Lake is Rebecca’s attorney.

STEVEN LAKE: Mrs. Reyes, Rebecca, is Jewish, always has been. Mr. Reyes converted to Judaism. They got married in a Jewish ceremony. Their little girl was being raised Jewish, and suddenly in the middle of the divorce case on what supposedly was just a normal visitation, he took and had his daughter baptized without any discussion with his wife. She found out by email.

REYES: Being Christian and having grown up the way I had and experiencing the things I had experienced, certainly I wanted to share many of those things with my daughter.

ROLLIN: Joseph blames the entire conflict, even his insincere conversion, on his in-laws.

REYES: Her parents made it clear early on that they had an issue with my being a non-Jew, and that was something that I think plagued and burdened the duration of the marriage.

LAKE: It was only in the context of the divorce case where he blamed this all on her parents. That he did it because of the pressure of the parents. The parents of course, denied it, Rebecca denied and said nobody pressured him into anything.

ROLLIN: Although when Ela visits Joseph the court has given him the right to take her to church, the court has given Rebecca permission to raise her daughter as a Jew.

LAKE: As custodial parent, the law is that she has the right to raise her little girl in the Jewish faith. Having said that, again it’s a question of is there going to be a little exposure to Catholicism, or is it going to be each a tug of war pulling on a little girl trying to get her to follow one religion or the other?

ROLLIN: A greater tolerance of interfaith marriages has led to more of them. They now comprise 25 percent of American households. But according to the American Religious Identification Survey, interfaith marriers are three times more likely to become divorced or separated than people who marry in the same religion.

ROLLIN: Professor Katheryn Dutenhaver runs DePaul University’s interfaith mediation program in Chicago, which deals solely with religious conflict with regard to children after divorce. Clergy are always included.

PROFESSOR KATHERYN DUTENHAVER (Interfaith Family Mediation Project): When the couple come in to a mediation and they are with the clergy of their own faith and they see the clergy talking with each other and they see the clergy talking with the other parent, it becomes a different conversation than in the courtroom where you are trying to prove one is better than the other. I think the fear that people have is that if my child is raised in the other parent’s religion, then the child will grow closer to the other parent and closer to the other grandparents.

REVEREND THOMAS DORE: Very often they don’t know enough about their own religion, let alone the other person’s religion to understand what are the implications if my daughter is going to be Jewish or our daughter is going to be Catholic? What does that mean?

ROLLIN: All the mediators agree that the best solution for children is to be raised in one religion.

RABBI GARY GERSON: If there is a divorce and even if there isn’t a divorce, the child is put in the middle between the two parents, and the question becomes one of if I go to this faith, then am I estranging myself from the other parent or vice versa. Parents are the ones who need to make the decisions, set the boundaries and the rules for the family. Otherwise the child is caught in the middle, and beyond that it’s a lack of clarity for the child. To have a little bit of each is end up having nothing.

ROLLIN: Bridget Jeffries, an evangelical, and Paul Meyers, a Mormon, have a different view. They are raising their daughter, Harley, in both faiths. Their marriage is intact now but they were separated for awhile and they have struggled with the issue of how to religiously raise Harley. Their religious practices have much in common, but theologically there are major differences.

BRIDGET JEFFRIES: The idea of my daughter saying that she has faith in Joseph Smith as well as Jesus and the Trinity, the Godhead to Mormons, that was very difficult for me to process, to think about her going through. I mean I love my husband, I know that he believes in all that, but I really wanted my daughter to just have my own faith, without Joseph Smith and the baptismal confession. So that was a big deal to me.

PAUL MEYERS: I still want her to be Mormon since I believe that Mormon is more right than evangelical, but then again anyone who believes one thing has to assume that it’s more right than the others.

ROLLIN: They are certainly tolerant of each other’s religion, but like so many interfaith marriers didn’t understand their deep feelings about their own religion until they had children.

JEFFRIES: I don’t think that I realized how badly I was going to want my daughter to grow up in my faith when I had her.

ROLLIN: What bothers Paul the most is that Harley might opt out of religion altogether.

MEYERS: She might become apathetic towards just religion in general. Mommy and daddy can’t agree, so.… The idea of believing in something is much more acceptable to me then the idea of believing in nothing.

ROLLIN: Meanwhile, Paul brings Harley to his church one Sunday and Bridget brings her to her church the next Sunday. In addition, they go to both churches as a family and observe both traditions at home.

JEFFRIES: We celebrate the Protestant liturgical calendar, but when we do readings from it, we often do readings from both the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

ROLLIN: Does she show any signs of confusion or do you worry that she will?

MEYERS: She shows no signs of confusion whatsoever.

JEFFRIES: Not so far.

JEFFRIES: This has been very difficult and it’s been very hard. We’ve made a lot of compromises and sacrifices to make it work. So both of our religions say to get married within the faith and we think that’s a very strong counsel that people should follow. We just didn’t.

ROLLIN: And the Jeffries-Meyers family is not alone. According to the National Study of Youth and Religion, fewer than one-fourth of 18-to-23-year-olds think it’s important to marry someone in the same faith. And even the clergy has accepted that in America today interfaith marriages are an increasing reality.

REVEREND DORE: The days are gone when you go to school with only a Jewish community, only a Catholic community. To say you can’t talk to this one, you can’t see this one, you can’t get involved in this one—that isn’t real. It just isn’t a reality at all in their life.

ROLLIN: What Bridget and Paul have in their favor is that they are deeply aware of the problems they are facing and will continue to face, and of the joys.

CHRISTI DEEGAN (speaking to marriage workshop): So one of the topics the church talks about is living together, cohabitating…

JUDY VALENTE, Correspondent: These young Catholic couples in Chicago are attending a marriage preparation workshop required by their church.

DEEGAN: And this is always such a hard topic to talk about, because the church teaches, you know, wait to have sex until you’re married, right?

VALENTE: Despite that teaching, half these couples may already be living together.

(speaking to Catholic couples): No guilt about your decision?

MAN: No, it never really came into play for me.

WOMAN: We’re both artists, we just don’t have—we can’t support ourselves on our own.

MAN: It’s important to get to know the person as well as you can before you get married.

WOMAN: The priest didn’t say anything bad. They didn’t ever say that we shouldn’t be living together. There was no condemnation.

VALENTE: Sex outside of marriage, divorce, homosexuality. For many Catholics, these no longer hold the stigma they once did. Catholics disagree with the church on a variety of other issues. The vast majority of Catholics say women should be priests, and according to a recent survey 58 percent said abortion should be a personal decision. The bishops keep talking about these issues, but fewer Catholics seem to be listening. What’s a pastor to say to the people in the pews?

REV. PATRICK LEE: It’s like being a parent to be a pastor. You never give up on your children, but you keep holding the ideal and explaining the ideal and hoping people will strive for it, but not condemning them when they fall short.

VALENTE: With so many Catholics going their own way these days, the role of pastor is perhaps more complicated than ever.

Rev. Patrick Lee

REV. LEE: When I was growing up, the church was the ideal we tried to change ourselves to match. Now people want to change the church.

VALENTE: Father Lee is the pastor of two parishes in Chicago. Most of his parishioners are highly educated, and they represent a diversity of views about church teaching.

REV. LEE: All authority is being questioned in our times. Some of it selfishly, some of it enlightened. I think Americans are more comfortable in an educated democracy now, and so they want to spread that democracy to the church, which has never really been a democratic organization. I think we have to be open to a dialogue of understanding what the church teaches and really hearing it and not dismissing it instantly. On the other hand, I think the church has to open itself to the wisdom of its laity.

JOE MURRAY: I’m a Eucharistic minister, and I’m a lector and an usher, when need be.

DENNIS KLUGE: I’ve been on the parish council for several years, but also I’m a lector, commentator, Eucharistic minister, and the lead bass in our church choir.

VALENTE: Joe Murray and Dennis Kluge have been a couple for 31 years. They are active members of Father Lee’s parish.

MURRAY: I understand where my pastor’s coming from, and he understands where I’m coming from, and on that topic we do not necessarily agree, but that’s okay because we respect each other.

Joe Murray and Dennis Kluge

KLUGE: I think it’s important that Joe and I just approach it as we are just two guys coming to church and we’re just here to worship like everyone else, and we get involved, people get to know us, and so we’ve never, at least personally I’ve never felt excluded.

MURRAY: Women probably have more of a reason to be angry at the church than we do, because we’re not allowed marry, but they’re not allowed to become priests. They’re told that because of their biology, that’s excluded for them.

VALENTE: As at many parishes, women in Father Lee’s congregation aren’t shy about expressing their disagreement, but they remain practicing Catholics nonetheless.

MARY ANN TRAUSCHT: I personally stay in the church because I believe the basic tenets that are taught, and what I disagree with are man-made laws, not what Jesus taught.

VALENTE: What about artificial birth control? Do you know women who’ve left over that?

KATHRYN CUNNINGHAM: Most of the women I know are doing what they need to do and not talking about it.

VALENTE: A good number of Father Lee’s parishioners are divorced and remarried. If they have not gotten their first marriage annulled, the church says they may no longer receive Communion. This is often ignored.

REV. LEE: If they want to receive Communion I explain to them why they’re asked not to receive Communion, and if they make the decision they feel they want to receive Communion, I have to honor their conscience, if their conscience is informed.

VALENTE: “Informed conscience” is something Catholics are increasingly citing as support for disregarding official teaching. It means, in essence, that one has studied church teaching, reflected on it, and concluded that the teaching can in good conscience be rejected.

(speaking to Rev. Lee): If your conscience is telling you this is not a sin, but the church’s teaching says it is a sin, and you know what the church’s teaching is, then where do you stand?

REV. LEE: If you take exception to a church teaching, you better have a pretty good reason and not just “it’s because I want to do this.”

VALENTE: Reconciliation refers to the sacrament of forgiveness that used to be known as confession. Father Lee waits in the confessional every Saturday. Some days, no one comes.

(speaking to Rev. Lee): Do people know what sin is?

REV. LEE: I think they do. I think our whole being tells us when we’re being sinful. It’s unpleasant to deal with our own brokenness, and yet for those people who are brave enough to take that step, there is such healing in that sacrament that I can’t imagine my life without it.

VALENTE (speaking to Joe Murray): In your view, is it possible to be a faithful Catholic and yet disagree very strongly with some church teaching?

MURRAY: You can be faithful, and you can dissent. Dissent is challenge, and had we had more dissent, public dissent, we may not have had to have gone through what we’re going through in terms of the clergy sexual abuse.

VALENTE (speaking to Rev. Lee): Is this new round of scandal making it more difficult for you to be a pastor?

REV. LEE: It makes me feel ashamed. It makes me look at that clerical culture of secrecy and say this is unhealthy. It needs to be blown open.

VALENTE: Recent allegations about that culture of secrecy have rekindled outrage at the institutional church. But people make a distinction between the Vatican and their own parish.

KLUGE: That’s the big church. The little church is really where my heart is, alright?

MURRAY: You have to define what church is for us. The church is our parish, so our experience of church is through the parish.

REV. LEE: I think part of it is the strength and beauty of the Catholic culture. I don’t think it’s a religion like some religions. I think it’s in your bones.

CUNNINGHAM: Women and some other people who have left the church come back to the church. Whenever they’re asked why did you come back, they say not having the Eucharist, something was missing. That brings them back. That hunger brings them back.

REV. LEE (preaching to congregation): We see the love of Jesus when he meets sinners in the gospels. He doesn’t condemn them. Instead, he invites them to come and accept healing, to come and accept forgiveness.

It’s certainly an important role to be compassionate, to draw people in from wherever they are into a closer relationship with Christ, and so you don’t achieve that by throwing up barriers and saying you can’t belong, you’re excommunicated. That strikes me as not terribly Christ-like. I’m the shepherd. I have to get the strays and keep nipping at their heels to get them back into the flock, where they’ll be safe.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the last in our series on Faith and Family in America. Today, how churches and other religious groups are responding to the growing number of families who are not the traditional married mother and father with children — single mothers, cohabiting men and women, gay couples, and the divorced.

TONY PERKINS (President, Family Research Council) (Speaking at Event): We’ve got to take a stand, even if it means people say bad things about you.

JUDY VALENTE: Tony Perkins is champing at the bit. The president of the Family Research Council told a California audience he is looking forward to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito. Perkins believes Alito will not be the kind of high court judge who tries to redefine marriage, but one who will uphold traditional religious values.

Mr. PERKINS (Speaking at Event): This nation will only be as strong as its families, and the families will only be as strong as the parents and marriages that bind them together.

VALENTE: Earlier this month, Texas became the 19th state to pass an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Mr. PERKINS: In every state where a marriage amendment has made its way to the ballot it has passed, on average with over 70 percent of the support of the voters.

VALENTE: These votes, he says, will put pressure on Congress to pass a similar amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Mike and Harriet McManus started Marriage Savers nearly 10 years ago. They say their program has saved 50,000 marriages that would have ended in divorce.

MIKE MCMANUS (Co-founder, Marriage Savers): You are declaring, by your actions here, a new day for marriage and an old day for divorce.

VALENTE: McManus says churches need to stop being wedding factories and start working to preserve marriages. Marriage Savers appears to have made an impact. Earlier this month, Cheyenne, Wyoming became the 198th city in which his “Community Marriage Policy” has been adopted. Clergy from different denominations signed the policy, agreeing to require four months of preparation for couples wanting to marry in their churches. The plan also provides support for troubled marriages.

Mr. MCMANUS: We think that there are couples in every church who could be trained to be mentors — to help people either prepare for marriage, to enrich existing ones, or save troubled ones. And this is really a new idea.

VALENTE: Those who volunteer to be mentors get a weekend of training before they begin to counsel other couples.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I came because I love children, and having been a teacher for many, many years, and watching the pain that children go through from a divorce — they don’t adjust well.

HARRIET MCMANUS (Co-founder, Marriage Savers): They’re sitting on a great mother lode of wisdom, a wealth of experience, some of it not so pleasant, but hopefully some of that experience has helped them to hone and fashion a more successful, more healthy marriage over the years.

VALENTE: Pam and Chad, who live together in Chicago, are about to take a premarriage inventory. She is Methodist. He is Catholic. And they want to get married in the Catholic Church. Each has filled out a lengthy questionnaire which includes specific questions for interfaith couples and for cohabiting couples. Now they will compare notes with a facilitator from the Archdiocese of Chicago.

EILEEN SMITH (Facilitator, Archdiocese of Chicago): Rather than marry and then over time have some of these items come to the surface — both strengths and challenges — take a look at it ahead of time and be able to communicate about it. Are we ready to plunge in?

PAM: I think so.

Ms. SMITH: Okay.

ELSIE RADTKE (Director of Family Ministries, Archdiocese of Chicago): Many of the young couples getting married today come from families of divorce, and they do not want to go though the pain of divorce. So their rational is, “If we live together it’s like test-driving the car. If we live together, then we’ll see how that is.” Of course, what they don’t know is what research is showing us, and that is that about 70 percent of the couples that do cohabit will end up divorced. You cannot test-drive commitment.

VALENTE: Pam and Chad, both from stable, intact families, are confident about their relationship.

PAM (To Ms. Smith): We have mutual respect for each other that I think we’ll always have. I think that’s kind of what makes a marriage work.

CHAD (To Ms. Smith): We seem to do everything together and we work together really well.

VALENTE: Without a camera in the room, Pam and Chad would go on to discuss more delicate issues, including their different faiths and their approaches to child rearing. In the end, the couple said they were pleased with the experience.

CHAD: I think we learned that we already have a strong communication base between the two of us and that, I think, we’re going to be in really good shape.

PAM: Yeah.

VALENTE: The counseling doesn’t always go so well. Sometimes couples discover the relationship wasn’t as good as they thought.

Ms. RADTKE: One of the ladies in our office that does the facilitation calls herself now the “marriage buster” because she has found that about 20 to 23 percent of the couples that she has worked with — and she’s worked with hundreds of couples — end up either postponing their plans to marry or canceling them completely.

VALENTE: For religious institutions, preserving traditional marriage is one aspect of supporting family life. Another is how to support couples who are not married.

Even in some conservative faith traditions, cohabitating couples, single moms, gay couples, and stepfamilies are not uncommon in their congregations. Some churches have been slow to address these changes in family life and now find themselves in a dilemma: how to pass on their traditional religious teachings while still reaching out to nontraditional families.

Sociologist Penny Edgell of the University of Minnesota has studied church outreach to couples and families. She found a lot of nostalgia for the traditional family.

Professor PENNY EDGELL (Sociologist, University of Minnesota): But I also found that there were a lot of congregations where there was really quite a bit of innovation. There was a lot of talk about how we make dual family earners fit. There was a lot of talk about ministry to single parents and the divorced.

Pastor GENE APPEL (Willow Creek Community Church): There’s not a person in this room that doesn’t need a family — some kind of place to belong, to be loved, to have mercy extended to you there. Let’s pray together.

VALENTE: Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago is one of the best-known of the megachurches. There are gay couples and cohabiting couples in the congregation. They are welcome, but there are no specific ministries for them.

Pastor RANDY FRAZEE (First Evangelical Free Church, Chicago): There is certainly a desire for churches to maintain and promote a concept of family that is extremely intact. And yet, again, I think we also have to deal with the reality that there is an enormous pandemic — there’s a crisis that’s going on, and we’re called on to reach out to help people right where they’re at.

VALENTE: In contrast to Willow Creek, the First Evangelical Free Church is a much smaller, more intimate congregation on the north side of Chicago. On a recent Sunday, a dramatic presentation on premarital sex, the challenges of marriage, and the issue of homosexuality.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Sometimes it’s so easy for we happily married couples. We wag our fingers and shake our fingers at those who didn’t make it, feeling all superior. As if we don’t all have our own troubles and secrets.

VALENTE: The congregants have developed a real sense of community, lingering long after the service is over. In addition, small groups meet on a regular basis in private homes. Some have become like small families. It is a place for people to share their burdens.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: I had a huge fight with my father yesterday.

JENNIFER: As you know, I wasn’t here last week because I was crying.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: There was a death in our family.

Pastor BILL SHEREOS (First Evangelical Free Church, Chicago): We can’t replace family, but we can provide supportive environments where we do treat one another like families. And we don’t have many particular groups that are targeted toward individual kinds of people or kinds of families, but we do a lot of mixtures.

JENNIFER: We were joking at dinner that there really is no functional family. There’s no family that’s normal.

MARY: Being part of a small group, you get different feedback and different ideas about things because we’re related to each other through Christ, but not necessarily through blood or marriage.

Prof. EDGELL: I make a distinction between what I call radical innovation, which is really reconceiving what a family is, and incremental innovation, which is keeping your idea of what a family is, but doing whatever you can in terms of practical changes in ministry to reach out to more people.

Pastor SHEREOS: There are two cultures I think that you have to bridge. And one is the culture of the Bible and the other is the culture in which you live. And to me, the church has to be a bridge between those two cultures,

VALENTE: Divorce is one area where churches do seem to be creating a bridge. St. Peter’s Catholic Church in the heart of Chicago’s business district is a place where people come and go throughout the day to say a quick prayer or just sit quietly. It also has an active outreach to divorced people.

CARYN WIECZORKIEWICZ (Facilitator, St. Peter’s Church): Most of them seem to come to the church because of divorce. They start coming more often to the services here, daily Mass, or stopping in to say a few prayers because it’s a time of struggle and there’s nowhere else to turn. Nonjudgmental friendship; seeing other people who are struggling as they are, who have the same faith background, who’ve all come from a background where they truly believed as they stood at the altar, “‘Til death do us part” — and now that’s all changed.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: For a lot of us growing up Catholic, Mom and Dad, the worst thing I could think of was losing my parents — never divorce.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #5: It was scary. What would happen to my faith, and how it would be accepted in the Church afterwards? It’s helped, talking it through with other people.

Ms. WIECZORKIEWICZ: There’s really two sets of people. There are people who come to Mass regularly, or who stop in at church when they’re going through a struggle — whether it be divorce or illness or whatever — and turn to church. Then there are others who are afraid to ask, they’re afraid to find out. They’re afraid of rejection. They’re trying to do it on their own. And that’s when they end up falling away.

VALENTE: Many churches struggle with ministry to unmarried couples.

Pastor SHEREOS: We have couples in our church that live together. And, you know, we don’t want to chase them out of the church. We want to minister to them in the name of Jesus. They would not end up being a leader in the church, but we would want them as part of the community.

VALENTE: Another issue is the status of gays, who make up a significant part of this Chicago neighborhood.

Pastor SHEREOS: We have some people in our congregation that would have same-sex attraction; some that would be gay couples. But our church wouldn’t give the message that that is a biblically endorsed lifestyle. We would recognize that it’s part of the broken world we live in.

VALENTE: Within the Catholic Church, ministry geared to gays is limited. In Chicago, at one church, one night a week, there is a Mass for A.G.L.O, the Archdiocesan Gay and Lesbian Outreach. It keeps a low profile. The priest did not want a camera at the Mass.

Elsie Radtke, of the Archdiocesan Family Ministries office, sees some signs of change.

Ms. RADTKE: I can’t speak for the Church. But I can speak for local parishes, and I have seen on the local level some very, very good pastoral outreach to couples and individuals who are homosexual. And they are treated with respect. They are invited to be part of the community.

Pastor FRAZEE: It’s easy for us to tell people what we’re against. It’s another thing — it takes up more energy and time to come alongside people where they’re at and show them grace. And the thing that the evangelical church, by and large, believes is that all of us fall short of the perfection of God. A church can, with great conviction and compassion, maintain a position of what we believe the Bible teaches about what is good, what is right, what is healthy, but at the same time reach out to people where they are in their time of need.

Prof. EDGELL: One of the things we have to be careful of is thinking about religious congregations, religious leaders, religious doctrine as somehow set in stone and that that’s what’s authentic religiously. Because whether religious communities acknowledge it or not, authentic expressions of faith are ones that are relevant for contemporary society.

VALENTE: Edgell predicts that the most successful churches of the future will be those, like St. Peter’s in downtown Chicago, that recognize the new realities of family life and respond compassionately to the members’ changing lifestyles.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY this is Judy Valente in Chicago.

ABERNETHY: And this footnote: in our RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY survey, about three quarters of nontraditional families and more than half of traditional families said love is what makes a family, and it doesn’t matter if people are gay, straight, married, or single.

]]>Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview with the Reverend Darrell Armstrong of Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, New Jersey:

My passion for working with families emanates out of my own childhood experiences. I was a ward of the court for 13 years in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. My mother had me — she was 15 years old. Dad was 18; didn’t know him until I was 22. Through an unfortunate set of circumstances, my mother’s companion was abusive towards me and my 18-month-old brother. Put him in a tub of hot water. It came to the attention of L.A. Department of Children’s Services, and we were removed from her custody. I was in foster homes for about two years out of my life and then placed in long-term kinship care, even though we didn’t call it that in the mid-1970s. It was my maternal grandfather who opened his home and took me in.

In October of 1998 my mother died of a drug overdose at the young age of 45. It was really at her death, when I did her eulogy standing in front of her casket at the L.A. cemetery, that I really recommitted myself to strengthening families, particularly African-American families, particularly those in urban communities.

I think anyone of African descent who would disagree that the African-American family is in crisis is not living in this world, is not being realistic. We may disagree on what are the causes of the crisis. But I think everyone has to accept that when statistics tell us that at least up to 70 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock, when statistics tell me that in some states, prison populations are comprised of greater than 50 percent African-American men where we only make up 6 percent of the United States population — who are women going to marry if that percentage of them are in jail and incarcerated, and they can’t vote once they get out of jail? We’re in a crisis. There’s no doubt about it. Is it genocidal? I wouldn’t say that, but we are in crisis.

I’m a Democrat, but I’m not led by party solely. I value distinct perspectives on issues. But I would agree with many of my evangelical brothers and sisters, many of my conservative Christian brothers and sisters who would say that when there is an absence of family model, structure of mother and father, and single parenting notwithstanding — I pastor a black church in urban America. I see the black women who are raising their children by themselves. I see the grandmothers who are raising their grandchildren by themselves. But that does not negate that if it took two to make that child, it should take two to raise that child. The absence of a nuclear family model — I think that is the genesis of a lot of the issues that are going on. If young black boys don’t see a positive black male role model, they will seek it somewhere else. I see a lot of that going on in our communities.

Anyone who talks about race in America — you can’t disconnect that issue from the intentional, deliberate onslaught of black families during slavery. I think it’s a direct result of the vestiges and the remnants of slavery. I think if there was an intentional policy by government, regardless of what level of government, to destroy families and to not allow them [to stay] together for the cause of keeping the slave enterprise, you know, profitable, then those remnants take a long time to work through. One has to remember [it was] only in the ’60s that we got rid of the vestiges of Jim Crow, which was as destructive as slavery was. I think some of that stems from those systemic issues of policies that were created. To get welfare in this country, once upon a time, you couldn’t have a man. We know that. So the government has had a part.

I would consider myself more of an independent, to then independently assess the politics of either side. But ideologically and philosophically I tend to agree [more] with the Democratic platform than a Republican platform. But that’s not the issue. The destruction of families — I won’t say it’s not a political issue, but as a pastor I have to address the systemic issues but also address the self-help issues, you know. As Dr. King said, folks can’t ride your back if it’s not bent over.

The new face of racism is not black and white or brown or yellow. I think it’s green. I think where jobs are located has an impact on who gets those jobs, who works in those jobs. I’m part of a coalition in the state of New Jersey, and we’re trying to assess issues from a regional perspective. Jobs are being [created] in New Jersey where the working poor are not living — in suburban communities. Developments are being built in suburban communities, but the working poor are living in Trenton, Camden, Paterson. That’s not where the job growth is. It’s in the suburbs. So how do those families get there? Will they carpool to public transportation? Here in New Jersey we have the historic Mount Laurel law. Development is supposed to build affordable housing in those suburban communities. But we have a loophole in New Jersey that allows suburban communities to sell off their obligation to build affordable housing in the suburban community to urban communities. And in the absence of a statewide housing plan, urban mayors like Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer are left in a quandary. They want the money to build affordable housing in their city, but it’s at the expense of not building it in the suburban communities. So it’s economic. There’s no doubt about it.

I have been on the front lines of the community Healthy Marriage Initiative in the state of New Jersey since its inception in 2001, 2002. I went down and knocked on doors in DC until I found out where Wade Horn’s office was and Bill Coffin’s offices were. Wade Horn is the undersecretary for children and families in the Bush administration and Bill Coffin is his marriage expert. There’s a national marriage movement that’s going on. Diane Sollee is riding the crest of it right now, and she is a marriage expert based out of Washington, DC. You know, 3,000 folk get together for the last several years in places around the country called Smart Marriages. But do you know less than probably one percent of those who are attending Smart Marriages are of African descent and from African-American churches? I was intentional. I went, and then I was so moved by it I sent a team from my church and commissioned them to not only go and get training in Christian prep for prevention relationship-enhancement programs, but to bring that back, institute it in our church, and figure out how we go about helping to strengthen families, but with marriage as the cornerstone.

In 1996, when Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) was reformed, it replaced the old AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the old welfare. A new model of welfare came into existence in 1996 under the Clinton administration. One of the purpose statements in TANF is the government finds that marriage is the foundation to a healthy society. The government says that. In the four purpose statements of TANF, one of them is to promote two-parent households. Another one is to promote strengthened families through job preparation and marriage. That’s in federal legislation. Bush just came and acted upon it. It was there under Clinton. A Democratic president and his administration enacted federal policy that puts marriage right at the center, at the vortex of a conversation about strengthening family, strengthening communities. I’d buy into it regardless of who put it in place.

I’m a man of African descent. Extended family has been something that I think predates slavery. Even in West Africa, you look at tribal, indigenous social systems and it may not have replicated the nuclear two-parent model that we see in Western Europe, but it did have an extended family. Now the old adage that Hillary made so famous, “It takes a village to raise a child,” that is part of African-American and African culture. African-American culture, because of slavery, has had to rely on extended family as well, to the degree that the church has become the extended family. So a single mother can bring her children to church and see deacons, see a pastor, see positive models of black manhood that challenge and offset the negative stereotypes they may see in and around their community.

This congregation — even though we’re set in the heart of urban-American Trenton — I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was a relatively affluent congregation. There are a lot of well-degreed, high-income-earning individuals and families in our congregation. But that is also not to say that we don’t have the families of the economically challenged — the welfare mothers. To the degree that there is divorce, yes, the national statistic is the national statistic — 50 percent of couples. I would say I see divorce all the time in the church. And I’d say this — that of the 20 marriages I do every year, about 15 of them are cohabitating with each other. That gives way to another conversation about the success of that marriage, right? But we’re trying to help that by giving them prevention and relationship-enhancement programs and other training so that when they get married, their marriages will be more successful.

I would say that the economic stress is less in middle-income families than it is in poverty-stricken families. We all know the statistics, and social science has proven that where there’s economic stress, there’s also mental and emotional stress as well that leads to abuse, that leads to displacement, that leads to generational patterns.

President Bush has been unabashed about his belief in marriage. President Clinton wasn’t as much, but he’s the one who put it in [the law]. The M word has been such a negative word because of, and let’s be real, because of the conversation, the debate about same-sex marriages. So when you start talking about marriage and family, it leads to a very interesting slope that has become so controversial. As you saw in this recent election, I mean, folks were very concerned.

Some other colleagues of mine in the state have come together and we’ve formed a couple of coalitions. One is the New Jersey African-American Healthy Marriage Initiative. We call it NJAAHMI. And there is a second more global, statewide initiative called the New Jersey Healthy Marriages Coalition, both of which are arms in New Jersey to bring faith-based and community-based organizations together to figure out how do we take advantage of potential funding from the federal government. But even in the absence of that, how do we take our communities back? You know, right here in Trenton, we’ve hosted marriage-saving workshops to train marriage mentors in churches. We’ve hosted Christian prep workshops. I’ve talked to the mayor of Trenton, who’s ready to commit publicly, to say, “I won’t marry anyone as a mayor without sending them first to you or someone like you, Reverend Armstrong, so they can at least get training.”

I’m just trying to win the battles that I can. If mayors and judges, who also do marriages, even though we know 70 percent of marriages are performed by clergy — even if they would say, “Wait. I’m not going to marry you until you’ve shown me that you’ve completed at least one training session with one trained individual” — our mayor and mayors around the state, they do five-minute ceremonies with folks they’ve never met before. How do you marry someone if marriage is the foundation of society, and yet we roll them off like cookie cutters on a conveyor belt? What is that saying for the success of those marriages and those relationships and those children? I’m working on a public policy level as well as on a faith level within the congregation to say, “Listen, ladies and gentlemen. Family’s important. It is the cornerstone of our society. And if we continue to go the way we are going in the African-American community, it may very well be genocide.”

We are selecting and training 10 couples per year to actually have them trained as marriage mentors. And they will then be fanned out to deal with three different types of couples in our congregation: those who have blended families, those who are in crisis, and those who are engaged and ready to marry. There will be trained personnel, if you would, in our congregation whose expertise is how to work with these blended families and deal with the issues of different children coming from different marriages and different backgrounds. Or another set would be trained how to counsel and get them ready for marriage. Another set will be just dealing with crises in marriages and how to strengthen them to utilize all the national training models that we can to bring it home to ground zero. If every church took responsibility for a quarter-mile radius of their church, we can then begin to make a difference — a multiplier effect.

Ask any African-American pastor of any African-American church, historically black church, in any urban community or anywhere around the country, do they have some kind of marriage ministry? I guarantee you about 90 percent of them will say yes, they do. What kind of training has been given to those working in their marriage ministry? I’ve said to my associate at Shiloh, “We’re going to send you to get the training requisite, and we’re going to tap into the trained Ph.D. counselors in our congregation and bring a counseling center together, build a marriage ministry.” The congregations are not drilling down to the level that I think they need to, to be successful in their marriage ministry. Most churches are going to say, “Of course we do something for the family. It’s endemic to who we are, you know, as a faith-based institution. We marry folk. We are in the business of bringing families together, keeping them together, counseling them and preaching and teaching to them every Sunday.” But how much training has that pastor had? If I can get more clergy trained, those who are doing the marriages, if I can get them certified in prep and other national models, they will become more effective in their ability to counsel those families.

In my concern it is priority number one. We have seven ministries in our church: Christian education, liturgy and worship, congregational care, missions, and evangelism — all that. Marriage and family is the ministry to which we’ve probably given the greatest budget, to work this with the men’s ministries of our church, the women’s ministries of our church, the seniors’ ministries of our church, and bring family, the emphasis on family — because in the absence of family we’re living an individualistic life, and in America that is our temptation — rugged individualism. But we need to bring the family and have it center. And that’s not a Republican issue, you know. That’s not a Democratic issue. That’s a religious issue.

I am slow to constantly put the African-American community as the most severe. Even though statistics bear out that we are leading in many indices that I rather us not lead in, I know that divorce and marital breakdown are real in suburban communities. I’ve lived in some of the most affluent suburban communities that one might imagine, in Stanford and Palo Alto and Princeton in New Jersey. I’ve seen my friends in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. I’ve watched those families also suffer from marriage breakdown, from abuse. Somehow I think stereotypically the media has portrayed African-American families in a certain way. It is only recently that we’ve seen this positive image of family through Bill Cosby and his wonderful, long-running television show. But count how may public images in media and in music we hear and see. I think it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hollywood projects certain things. I think certain families live up to certain things. And I think churches have to take it one church at a time and one community at a time. But I full well agree it’s a problem across the board. If you ask those who are divorcing and making up the divorce rate — we’re only 12 percent of the population, so, you know, if the divorce rate in America is 50 percent, a whole bunch of other folk getting divorced as well and a whole bunch of other families are being affected.

]]>Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview with the Reverend Eugene Rivers in Boston, Massachusetts:

I have been working on issues of public safety and violence, and by implication black family issues, for the last 25 years, intensely focused on that. And over the last 25 years I have seen the complete unraveling of what has been understood for all of our history in this society to be the black family. I’ve seen phenomenally high divorce rates among black families, regardless of class, even when we control for socioeconomic difference. I’ve seen extraordinary levels, as a result, of father absence, which has contributed to crime and higher incarceration rates among young children who did not have the benefit of a two-parent household. It has been observation over many years, as well as the intellectual crisis within the black community with regard to the family. We saw it in 1965 with the Moynihan report, where there was a great deal of denial. Moynihan was labeled a racist, and the black community just continued to unravel. So here we are 40 years after the Moynihan report, and the black community is in a state of crisis.

We have a generation of young people who buy what they want and beg for what they need and who in many cases, based on current labor market demands, would be obsolete for slavery, as we see China become an increasingly powerful competitor on the global market with the United States. It’s a confluence of factors that have brought us to the conclusion that there needs to be a forthright, articulate, clear discussion [about black families]. Not that everyone agrees. People will disagree about what family is, and that’s okay, but at least there needs to be a rational discussion to facilitate some new policy conversations 40 years after Moynihan.

Father absence is the single most important independent variable affecting or correlated with incarceration rates for young males or some form of criminal justice supervision. So you have this issue of father absence contributing to, being a variable in, as a predictor of whether or not a young black male gets involved in the criminal justice system. Well, it seems to me that if there is a variable, that if it’s not causal but is correlated with incarceration patterns and predictions, we should be having a discussion about how do we keep fathers in families when you have got these divorce rates, when we look at teen pregnancy.

It has been greatly underestimated — the role of fathers in contributing to the stability of girls. Every girl needs a daddy. The daddy is the first guy in a girl’s life who tells the daughter she is beautiful. There are some very, very basic things that aren’t nuclear physics that have to do with the socialization and rearing of our children.

We have higher pregnancy rates. We have phenomenally high sexually transmitted disease rates that are so terrible that you don’t have any public discussions of it because most good liberals in traditional black leadership don’t want stereotypes being reinforced. So we don’t discuss the fact that we have got these phenomenal problems that are creating in some instances a biological underclass. This is absolutely terrifying.

My wife specializes in math education, and after 20 years of doing community organizing she says the single most important factor shaping the academic achievement of the child is the family and the culture produced by the family. It is not per capita expenditures on public schools; it’s about what families do with their children. Stable families produce better, higher-achieving students than families that are broken. By every possible sociological indicator that we can use, if there’s not some causal relationship, the correlation is almost one to one.

Part of it, I think, has to do with labor markets. William Julius Wilson talked about this 30 years ago in his studies on black unemployment trends and patterns in the black community. Another piece is culture. What kind of culture are the young people raised in? It was very difficult to talk about culture because Bill Ryan in BLAMING THE VICTIM said that if we talk about culture within the context of poverty and race, we are blaming the victim. Well, no. Another factor that contributes to this instability and nonperformance across these indicators is that a stable black family can create the appropriate culture of achievement, of discipline, of gratification deferral, which are the basic things that any civilization in any society needs to rear healthy children that become functional adults.

The welfare system has contributed. It was the development of a welfare system that penalized women for having fathers in the household that here again promoted, directly or indirectly, a culture of poverty and encouraged the kind of bad habits that do not lend themselves to helping young people become successful participants in the society.

In my judgment, there are some unresolved issues around the roles and images of black males as providers, performers, producers that go back to slavery and the breakup of the family. We had a brief period where it was slightly more stabilized. But the issue of familial stability — we saw that in the Moynihan report, in the scholarship of E. Franklin Frazier, W.E.B. DuBois, and a whole range of scholars that said, “Look, there are some factors that have to be corrected for that are intergenerational, and we have got to focus on those in a very coherent way.”

Part of what I see contributing to this was a major cultural shift. You know, the liberalization of sex, you know, during the ’60s and early ’70s created an environment where sex was disconnected from commitment, and that was viewed as progressive. The recreational sexual practices of the elite, who could engage in sexual and pharmacological experimentation, when it filtered down to the poor had absolutely catastrophic consequences.

Black churches are now maintaining as much order as they can for the people whose lives they directly impact. The incidence of divorce for regular church-attending communicants, right, is dramatically lower, just much, much lower than those that are non-church attending. Why hasn’t the black church had a greater influence? If there are such phenomenally high levels of religious participation on the part of the black community, why hasn’t this filtered down? Well, I think there are a couple of factors. One is the black church has not successfully engaged the culture. We live in a very different culture. Hip-hop, which is middle-range pornography, is having a very corrosive effect upon growing numbers of young black people, and the church has not successfully engaged that culture. So you have this generational disconnect where an increasingly older baby-booming black church-attending population, which is largely middle-class, is disconnected from an increasingly significant black underclass that is disconnected from the churches as well as the black middle class, who should play some socializing role in the lives of the poor. But as a result of the residential resegregation of the black poor as a function of the black middle class moving out and commuting into churches, we have a major cultural crisis.

Black preachers have their own sex problems. And the issue of sexual fidelity and what it takes to produce a culture of sexual fidelity has to begin in the church. The way one arrests the moral disorder of the black community is to correct the moral disorder within the black church. The black leadership, the black church must exhibit and model the kind of moral culture and provide some empirical evidence that legitimates the moral discourse around fidelity, simply from a functional standpoint. Forget the morality; it is simply more functional to be faithful to the mother of your children so that the children [are] socialized to believe that relationships have integrity, you know, relationships are sacred. And as a result, sex should not be disconnected from commitment or integrity, and that’s a challenge before the black church.

In some cases we have highly visible black clergy, whose names are too well known for me to mention, who have been caught in sexually compromised situations where there was a very public expression of infidelity that was humiliating for the wife and family and was the source of a significant scandal in the black community. Now those kinds of events, which are highly visual, tend to be demoralizing, because in many cases you have got young people, you have got young women who are thinking about marriage and companionship and [they] believe increasingly that there is no possibility of having a trusting relationship of permanence over the long term. And so the black churches — we have not done enough to model, walk the talk, you know, of fidelity and integrity. And it is a spiritual issue, it is a political issue, it is a cultural issue.

Part of the problem is that the black church, not unlike many other churches, has not had a coherent theology of sexuality that would deal with the realities, the struggles, the difficulties of sex. It’s not that the black church is actually homophobic. As I told a gay friend of mine, homophobia — whatever that means — is a symptom of a deeper issue, which is the black church has not dealt with the question of sex in a forthright way. There is not a systematic theology of human sexuality, of marriage, of fidelity. The black church has failed to present that and project that. As a result, many of the problems the black community has must be laid at the foot of the church.

Some churches normalize the abnormal. The traditional understanding for the last 2,000 years within the Eastern and Western church of what constituted a normative understanding of marriage has been the subject or the object of considerable debate recently. Our view is that there needs to be a philosophically coherent defense and exposition of the normative understanding that is civil, that is courteous, but that is clear. So that if there is debate or dissent, we can have that discussion, and the object of our statement was to provoke that discussion at a more intellectually serious level. So that we weren’t name-calling, it wasn’t PC rhetoric back and forth. You’ve got right-wing cuckoo rhetoric; you got left-wing cuckoo rhetoric. Pick your poison. We can go from Lynchburg, Virginia to San Francisco and get flip sides of the same coin. What we were calling for was for the black community, for Cornel West, for Michael Dyson, our celebrity intelligentsia, our theologians to be engaged in a serious discussion around the issue.

If there is anybody that does need the traditional family, it’s the black community. We don’t presume to tell white people what to do. What we do know is that in the black community we are completely off the hook with a wire cut. In the black community we have gone from “Lift every voice and sing” to “booty-popping bootylisciouness,” where pornography is mainstreamed. That is in part a function of the failure of black men to respectfully and lovingly support black women, the mothers of their children. I do know this: black men who father children need to be there to support the mothers with whom they had the child so that child can come up healthy, and that is my definition of a family. I father a child with a woman, I am morally obligated to partner with that woman in the rearing of that child.

Increasingly, the black church is going to be picking up on this issue, because they simply can’t avoid it. Once it becomes more public what the sexually transmitted disease rates are for black teenage girls, or how disproportionately the AIDS epidemic has impacted black people, there is going to be a national come-to-Jesus discussion with black churches about how we have failed to engage the issue.

The language, the apparel, the sexually explicit nature of public conversation on a bus on the part of 12-, 13-, 14-year-old girls is unbelievable. Whites don’t have the sexually transmitted disease rates that blacks have. Whites don’t have the level of disorganization and poverty that we saw in evidence with Hurricane Katrina. Whites have a level of organization. If the statistics that exist for blacks existed for whites, there would be a national summit every week on how to save our children.

If the infection HIV rates for black girls continue to grow, they in turn produce HIV fetally infected infants. In a country with no national health care system, new kinds of discussions around who deserves to receive health care come into play.

Liberals have been intellectually incoherent for 30 years. That’s one of the reasons they continue to lose in terms of political power. The secular liberals and to some extent religious liberals have been intellectually incoherent. They say all the politically correct things, but there are no solutions. Now I’m not saying that the conservatives have solutions. The major contribution to the national conversation on the part of political conservatives is to criticize liberals, which takes absolutely no imagination. It’s not as though they have said anything that produces new ideas. They simply say that the idiot was an idiot, which doesn’t take us anywhere.

What Bill Bennett said was unfortunate, and the only thing more unfortunate than what he said was his failure to apologize for it and the attitude he exhibited. Bill Bennett should have said it was an error of the lip and not the heart. But unfortunately, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, he only made a bad situation worse, by failing to simply say, “What I said was not intended as it came out, I apologize to anyone offended, I’m a humble person and so I apologize,” which is the only appropriate response regardless of what the intent was.

White male ex-offenders have, in a number of cities, a better chance of getting employment than college-educated black males. That’s still true. I’m not going to exaggerate the significance of that because I don’t want to make excuses. There are issues of job training, labor markets, job availability, and those issues have to be addressed. And then there are issues of culture. We are producing a generation of young black males who don’t know how to conduct themselves in a job interview, who come in trying to looking like a rapper when what was required was a shirt and a tie and English at least as a second language, and it is the failure on our part to properly resocialize these young people. In other words, who was right was Bill Cosby. Cosby had it right, notwithstanding Michael Dyson’s marginally useful critique.

The only institution that has the capacity and better deal with it are the black churches working in collaboration with other community-based agencies. So the Urban League, the NAACP, the Untied Negro Women’s Association — all of those agencies have to be collaborating with black churches to engage this issue.

One of the things that is perhaps most disturbing is that the divorce rate for blacks, the out-of-wedlock births actually travel up and down the class ladder. Black middle-class people have a divorce rate that exceeds the national average. It is twice the national average for middle-class people. So whatever socioeconomic strata you go to, we still have this crisis, so it runs throughout the entire community.

One cannot overemphasize how corrosive the popular culture has been. I mean, its sewage. It’s sewage. You can’t build healthy young people with healthy attitudes. Just take males. It’s misogynistic. Where are the feminists when I need them? They should be all over this. You’ve got these absolutely reprehensible, misogynistic lyrics. Then the high liberals come out and say First Amendment rights for the folks who want to promote pedophilia and misogyny, except when it comes to right-wingers who are outraged by this stuff, because they don’t have First Amendment rights. They are cavepeople; we don’t want to hear from them.

Blacks have the highest church attending rates probably of any group in the society. Pew and Gallup data seem to indicate that’s the case. So why is it that we have such a dramatic breakdown culturally, behaviorally? There are a couple of things going on. One is many people do not have any sense of how pervasive and powerful the culture industries are in terms of saturating the public mind with stuff that’s pornographic, that gets targeted early. So, for example, black church folk go to church, let’s say, twice a week. They watch more television than any other group. Nobody sits in front of the tube and looks at more garbage more hours of the day than the black community. No other group sits in front of BET or some other, MTV, looking at pornographic video culture than blacks. We sit up and watch that stuff ’round the clock. Now let’s say 20 hours a week of television, which is probably low, versus two hours on Sunday. Who wins? We undo a lot of what we learned on Sunday with the next 20 hours of absolutely disgusting programming that we have our children watch because the television is a babysitter. It’s amazing. Add to that the radio music. Then in addition to television we’ve got “booty-popping bootylicious back that thang up” lyrics on the radio. So we really have a very challenging cultural crisis for which the church has not really developed a thoughtful strategy. The average age of the average black clergyman has got to be in the 50s. He is competing with a rapper or a producer who is 22.

The black preacher, ironically, is still the leading, stabilizing role model in the black community, even with everything that we’ve said about what the black church does not do. The black church is now sort of morphing into the de facto government for black America. If we got every one of the 65,000 black churches that exist in the United States to carry 300 times their load — even if they did that, they would be less than a drop in the bucket for 35 million black people in the United States.

There has to be a new conversation. There have got to be new strategic partnerships, and the black community across the board has to make the decision that we are going to own our stuff. We are going to own sex; we are going to own crime; we are going to own the programmatic piece of developing the kinds of comprehensive programs in collaboration with the public sector and the private sector to address the problem. At the end of the day, black people have to take the moral responsibility for themselves.

I have heard no one call me a racist. Folks would like to say I was too conservative, but that would be difficult to sustain because I’m a Democrat. On the economy I’m a liberal. Estate taxes — bad. Iraq war — bad. Should they get out? There should be an exit strategy. Was it a mistake? Absolutely. Were there weapons of mass destruction? I’m still waiting. So on any number of issues, on war and peace, bread-and-butter issues, I would be a liberal unquestionably, which is right at the center of the black church tradition. The overwhelming majority of black church people are Democrats. The overwhelming majority of black people voted for Kerry, not because they were thrilled about it. The overwhelming majority of black people on cultural and social issues were conservatives [and] on bread-and-butter, economic, peace and justice issues were liberals.

We have come to the end of a cycle. The kind of high paleo-liberal integrationist policy, politics, and rhetoric are over. It’s over. Intellectually there’s no traction. Politically there’s no traction. Nobody’s going to put any money behind it. Even the liberals who are exhausted say they were all bad ideas. We hate the Republicans, but we can’t go back to this other stuff. Aside from which, we don’t know what to do in terms of black leadership because none of the established recognized brand names have any real political traction in the black community. Obama is a rock star. He’s gorgeous, articulate, good liberal, end of story. He’s a good liberal, and as long as he is able to keep that together he will be in the Senate. He will not probably in our lifetime be President of the United States. That’s not going to happen.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the next in our series on Faith and Family in America. In a national survey we commissioned, three quarters of all Americans say they believe it’s likely their children will grow up to be of the same religious faith as their parents, but more than half say they worry about that. Betty Rollin reports on the parents and children of four religious traditions in three very different families.

BETTY ROLLIN: A special prayer clock calls the Ashmawi-Ibrahim family to prayer five times a day. Hassan was born in Egypt, his wife Salma in Kuwait — both into religious Muslim families. Now in Centreville, Virginia, it is of utmost importance to them, they say, to keep their religion strong among their four children.

HASSAN IBRAHIM: To us religion is not just a practice; it’s a way of life. It’s part of the value system.

SALMA ASHMAWI: They know that every day they have five times that they stand before God and that they are meeting God — basically they have an appointment with God, so there is a self-discipline. How can they stray between five times prayers and know that they are going back to stand before God, and keep that appointment knowing they just did something that they shouldn’t?

ROLLIN: Has any one of your children ever said, “I just don’t like praying so much”?

Ms. ASHMAWI: Everybody tries to get out of prayer when they are still young. They all do. You have to remind; you constantly remind.

Mr. IBRAHIM: Yeah, you cannot force them. You cannot drag them to pray.

ROLLIN: Professor Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia studies religion and the family.

Professor W. BRAD WILCOX (Department of Sociology, University of Virginia and Resident Fellow, Institute for American Values): The parents who are more religious and are affectionate and firm with their kids are likely to ensure that they will transmit the faith that they have to their children. Parents who are too strict with their kids, who are authoritarian parents, are more likely to see their children rebel, both with respect to their moral beliefs as well as their religious beliefs.

ROLLIN: There seems to be little rebelling in this family. Ayah is 20 years old and goes away to college.

AYAH: There’s a lot of temptation. You are away from home for the first time and you look around you and everybody is just doing exactly what their parents don’t want them to do. I know that I don’t want to do those things. So, how am I going to keep myself busy and keep myself motivated? And I was able to do that by keeping strong in my faith.

ROLLIN: Like many religious parents, Salma and Hassan are active in their children’s public school. One area that troubles them is how sex education is taught.

Mr. IBRAHIM: It seems sometimes that they are forcing on the children maybe values that are contradictory to our beliefs.

ROLLIN: As Muslims, the Ashmawi-Ibrahim children have special challenges with their peers. Mohamad is 12.

MOHAMAD: I was running the mile in school, and I was saying verses from the Qur’an, and I was saying them out loud. And every time I ran by someone or someone ran by me, they would stop and they would be like, “What are you saying? What are you doing?”

ROLLIN: Nada is 15.

NADA: Sometimes, you know, in school you just want to fit in. You don’t want to be different. But I just find a group of friends that kind of accept me for who I am.

ROLLIN: Nada’s parents would like her to cover her head like her sister Ayah, but they don’t push it.

NADA: It’s my choice. When I’m doing everything else perfectly and when I feel like I’m completely ready for it, I feel like that’s when I’ll take that step.

ROLLIN: Muslim women are supposed to dress modestly — a problem for Salma when she shops with Nada.

Ms. ASHMAWI: Blouses are too short. They barely cover her stomach. If you find something that covers the stomach, it doesn’t cover the top. I tell you!

Mr. IBRAHIM: My son who is 22 went through high school without dating, went through college without dating. I mean — that is the most difficult thing. And when I go to pick him up from school and see how the girls are dressed, I say I really sympathize for him. It’s very, very difficult.

ROLLIN: For many conservative Muslims, going out with the opposite sex, except as a prelude to marriage, is forbidden.

NADA: I do have friends that are guys. And so occasionally, like if we all want to go bowling or to the movies, I might ask to do that, but they feel strongly against it, and I think that I’ll probably understand why when I’m older. But I do kind of argue with them about that.

ROLLIN: Who wins?

NADA: They do!

ROLLIN: Judy Costello is a single mother in Bethesda, Maryland.

JUDY COSTELLO: I was married in 1989, expected to be happily married ever after. I was married in the Catholic Church. We had four children: Michael was born in 1992; Julianne is 11; Daniel is nine; and Naomi is five. Ultimately we were separated in 2002 and formally divorced in 2003.

As a single mother, I face the challenges of limited time and financial resources. As a Catholic single mother, I face the challenge of working to role model the Catholic teachings for my children without having two parents in a household to practice what we’re preaching.

ROLLIN: The divorce tested Judy’s faith, but ultimately it was her faith that helped her through it.

Ms. COSTELLO: To me, our religion — Catholicism — is about loving others and treating other people the way you want to be treated, having a respect and love for God, family, and friends, and even those who aren’t as respectful towards you. With that overriding framework, it helps me help our children make choices in their daily life.

JULIANNE: Naomi couldn’t find her backpack before we went to school and I knew I didn’t want to be late, but I remember it’s better to help people than to think of ourselves. So I stayed and helped her look for it.

ROLLIN (To Naomi): What do you pray for?

NAOMI: I pray for family and friends to be safe and for victims of Hurricane Katrina and for them to find their moms and dads, ’cause a bunch of people, they don’t have water, food, and they miss their moms and dads.

ROLLIN: Do you pray for yourself?

NAOMI: Like, I pray for nothing bad to happen.

ROLLIN: Is religion good for children? Professor Wilcox says yes.

Prof. WILCOX: Parents whose kids are more religious are likely to see their kids do slightly better in school and also to see their kids to be much less likely to be involved with alcohol and drugs, to be delinquent or to experience psychological distress, things like depression, for instance.

ROLLIN: Religion is not the only thing this family is busy doing. There is soccer for Michael, tap dancing for Naomi, and modern dance for Julianne. Judy has managed to make all of this work while holding down a full-time job, often done on her lap — which is not to say she doesn’t worry.

Ms. COSTELLO: I am most worried almost in the innocence of our children. I try to give them enough information so that they can make the right choices, but I get the sense that in a couple years my children will be surprised by the things they didn’t know.

ROLLIN: Of course, part of every parent’s job is to worry about the children. Our poll reveals that religious conservatives in particular — more than half the number of traditional Catholics and almost as many evangelical Christians — worry about their children seeing too much sex and violence on TV, video games, and in the movies. Many parents hope that religion will not only instill better values in their children but protect them from these negative influences in the culture.

And what about families with two religions? Meet Eric Nelson and Sarah Anders of Rockville, Maryland and their children, 14-year-old Faith and 10-year-old Marc.

ERIC NELSON: I grew up a Reform Jew. Both sets of grandparents came over from Belarus, very hard, under very hard circumstances. Neither of my parents really wanted to force us to go to services like they were forced to. But I still identify myself as a Jew, consider myself a Jew.

SARAH ANDERS: I was brought up a Southern Baptist in Little Rock, Arkansas. I came from a very religious family, and both of my parents came from families who were Southern Baptist and very active in their church.

ROLLIN: Ultimately, their parents accepted their marriage. Even so …

Ms. ANDERS: I do have an aunt who is very Baptist and lives in Atlanta, and she prays for Eric every day that he will be saved, that he will come to know Jesus.

ROLLIN: It’s Sunday morning. Sarah and her daughter Faith are at Christ Congregational Church. A few blocks away, Eric and Marc are singing Jewish prayers at IFFP, the Interfaith Families Project, a community of Jewish and Christian families where both religions are taught and celebrated.

Ms. ANDERS: Once I started taking Marc and Faith to church, he really sat up and said, “Wait a minute, this is not going to work. We have to do something different.” And we were lucky we found out about this interfaith families group and went to a picnic at one of the member’s houses. And I remember going out on their back porch and looking at this sea of people and saying, “Finally, a place where we belong.”

Mr. NELSON: The reason why we ended up coming up with what we did, which is essentially a compromise, is because I really kind of felt that I was betraying my traditions and my roots and, you know, all my relatives who were killed for being Jews, by not pitching in and making sure that our children at least had an understanding and an exposure to my tradition and where I came from.

ROLLIN: Suppose your children decide to be Jews?

Ms. ANDERS: I knew you were going to ask that. I knew you would ask that. As long as they have a spiritual life, I don’t care.

ROLLIN: I’m not convinced.

Ms. ANDERS: No? It’s deeper and more complicated than that. It’s the intimacy of the religion; it’s what I know. It’s the language of belief that I know. I love the rituals in Judaism, but it’s not in my blood.

ROLLIN: What if your children become Christians?

Mr. NELSON: The biggest disappointment to me would be the loss of the heritage and the loss of the tradition and the loss of the identity.

ROLLIN: In the last 40 years there has been a marked increase in interfaith marriages. What effect does this have on the children?

Prof. WILCOX: It makes them less likely to be religious both as teenagers and as young adults; there are some risks in terms of delinquency and depression. On the positive end of the ledger, I would say that these kids tend to think for themselves more than other children, and they tend to have a better sense of how different traditions relate to one another or don’t.

ROLLIN: Are they more tolerant?

Prof. WILCOX: They’d be more tolerant, typically. That’s right, yes.

Ms. ANDERS: Hopefully they will wind up with more tolerance and an openness to people being whatever they are. But I think, realistically, I think the day-to-day challenges, just the logistics, going to Interfaith, going to church, doing Rosh Hashanah, doing seders, doing Hanukkah, doing Christmas — it’s sort of a mess. So it’s very busy, and sometimes I wish, “Oh, why can’t we just have Easter, and just only Easter!”

Mr. NELSON: Easter being one of the more difficult holidays.

Ms. ANDERS: Yes!

ROLLIN: Children of interfaith marriages are more likely to question religion.

FAITH: Sometimes I don’t think God is real, because sometimes I’ll say prayers and my prayers won’t come answered. So I’ll be, like, “Yeah, you are not real. Bye.” But then, you know, after all you learn, all the miracles that happened, you kind of have to start to believe that someone is looking over you and is looking over our country.

MARC: I have scientific explanations for about everything they say God has done. The world started from bacteria. The parting of the Red Sea, tides coming in — they just didn’t know what the heck that was.

ROLLIN: So you question what you learn in religion; you just don’t accept it?

FAITH: Well, you accept some of it but, I mean, you question a lot of it. I think you question more than you accept.

MARC: That’s mostly it.

ROLLIN: Studies show that at age 16 and 17, children from one-faith families may start to question religion as well, as they grow more independent from their families. But when they marry and become parents themselves, they often return to religion, if only to pass it on to their children.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the first of four special reports on Faith and Family in America. A poll commissioned by RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY shows that Americans both idealize the traditional family — husband and wife with children — and at the same time are more and more accepting of divorce, cohabitation, and the growing number of families that are nontraditional. Kim Lawton spent time with five different families.

DANNY SMITH: I spend most of my time wishing that I could make the traditional family happen and can’t seem to get there.

AMBER DAVIS: I believe that God has ordained the family to be set up a certain way, and my belief is that it’s the husband and the wife with children.

CHRIS JOHNSON: God’s intention for family is more rooted in things like compassion and social justice.

ARLENE ACKERMAN: I’m not sure there is one biblical model of family.

ALFREDO FARIAS: My wife is, for me, the instrument of my salvation.

KIM LAWTON: Across America, the relationship between faith and family is complicated as people attempt to live out deeply held beliefs amid rapid social change.

Professor NANCY AMMERMAN (Sociologist, Boston University): Religion has always had a strong interest in the family, because families were seen as the way in which the next generation would be socialized into, taught the traditions of the religious communities.

LAWTON: Many people of faith start with the Book of Genesis, when God put Adam and Eve together and said a man would leave his father and mother to join with his wife and become “one flesh.”

UNIDENTIFIED MINISTER (At Wedding): The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation.

LAWTON: But exactly what that means for today has become a matter of sharp debate in a society where only a quarter of all households live with children in a traditional family.

According to our national RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY survey, 71 percent of all Americans believe “God’s plan for marriage is one man, one woman, for life.”

UNIDENTIFIED MINISTER: Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder.

LAWTON: Professor Penny Edgell has studied the connections between religion and family.

Professor PENNY EDGELL (Director of Graduate Studies, University of Minnesota): There’s still a kind of nostalgia for what I call an “Ozzie and Harriet” family — a male breadwinner family. And what I found surprising was that that nostalgia was in both evangelical churches, which we might have expected because we know what their official views about the family are, but also in mainline Protestant and Catholic churches.

LAWTON: Although such ideals persist, there is also growing acceptance of choices which do not live up to that. A majority of Americans now accept divorce, and roughly half accept cohabitation. Even among evangelicals and traditional Catholics, only about a third say that divorce is a sin. Such attitudes have permeated even the most conservative of communities.

Outside Charlotte, North Carolina, descendants of James Samuel Mullis have gathered for their 50th annual family reunion. Danny Smith greets his relatives as they come in the door. It’s a time for catching up on family news and enjoying some country cooking. Danny describes himself as a born-again Christian who attends a nondenominational church. He says family is immensely important to him, and at the reunion he tells family lore, such as how his grandfather helped him find the grave of a relative from the 1860s.

Mr. SMITH: The history of our family is special to us and makes you feel connected. I think it builds your self-esteem, your confidence.

LAWTON: But family has also been the source of deep pain for Danny. He fathered his oldest son 20 years ago out of wedlock. And he’s divorced from the mother of his second son, who’s now 15.

Mr. SMITH: I always dreamed that I was going to be a good father and a good husband and have a home and a family, and that was going to be how I measured my success. And whenever that didn’t work out, it was real — it was extremely hard for me. It was the biggest failure that I ever felt in my life. But, once again, after a while, you just come to terms with it. You make the best of it and you roll on.

LAWTON: Danny doesn’t get to spend the time with his sons that he would like, but he says he tries to capitalize on the moments he does have.

Mr. SMITH: I don’t remember my father ever telling me that he loved me. I tell my boys that I love them all the time, and I ask them, “Do you know how much I love you?” And they’ll say, “More than anything else in the world,” because I’ve told them a million times.

LAWTON: Danny lives on a horse farm with Leslie Boone. They’ve been together for 14 years, but they aren’t married.

(To Mr. Smith): Is that something that was kind of tough for your families to deal with?

Mr. SMITH: It still is.

LESLIE BOONE: It still is. Yeah, I think it is. I think they would rather, you know, we make it legal. What’s the problem in 14 years?

Mr. SMITH: Since I’ve been married — she’s never been married, never had children — I know firsthand the pressure that puts on a relationship. It’s intimidating.

LAWTON: They say if they’d had children together, they probably would have gotten married. They try to replicate family as best they can in the midst of their nontraditional situation. Still, they admit to some internal conflicts.

Ms. BOONE: I think about that a lot, the example that I set, because I do believe in the institution of marriage. As a culture, we have to say you have to stay with your kids. You have to take care of the kids you have. They should have a mother and a father.

Mr. SMITH: I don’t care what society thinks anymore. The trouble that I have with it is the Scripture. I don’t think that I’m a bad person. I don’t think that I’m really setting a bad example, but I think I am living out of the standards set down in the Bible.

LAWTON: Danny’s situation contrasts sharply with that of his niece, Amber Davis, who organized this year’s family reunion. Amber and her husband Corey married at 19 and are coming up on their sixth wedding anniversary. They have two sons, Ethan and Nolan. They are committed evangelicals who met at a Christian high school.

Ms. DAVIS: I always prayed for my husband before I ever met him, so he just seemed like the one.

LAWTON (To Ms. Davis): What did you pray?

Ms. DAVIS: I asked God to give me peace about my future husband and to show me, you know, when I met him if he was the one.

LAWTON: Amber is a stay-at-home mom who intends to homeschool the kids. They call it an old-fashioned arrangement that works for them.

COREY DAVIS: We don’t like the idea of other people raising our kids. And we want to instill in them the values that we want to instill in them and not have somebody else subverting that.

LAWTON: Corey and Amber say they want their children to embrace faith at a young age as they both did. They attend an independent Baptist church and rely on its support to help them teach their kids. They say they try to put God first in their relationship.

Ms. DAVIS: We’ve recently started marriage counseling, too, with our preacher — just kind of as — what was the way you put it?

Mr. DAVIS: Preemptive.

Ms. DAVIS: Preventative maintenance — something like that. And he gave a good example of the triangle.

Mr. DAVIS: The closer that you get to God, the closer you get to each other.

Ms. DAVIS: Right. And we totally believe that.

LAWTON: They never considered living together before they married and are determined to stay together for life. But they’re reluctant to criticize people who don’t live the same way.

Ms. DAVIS: I’ve known people — we have people in our family who — they live together, and they’ve been together for years and years and years. They’re just as good as married. So, I mean, in instances like that, I don’t see as much wrong with that as someone who’s constantly having different people in their home and stuff like that.

LAWTON: They also are reluctant to call divorce a sin.

Mr. DAVIS: I don’t think it’s a sin. I think it’s like a lot of things. God would prefer it not happen if it doesn’t have to, but I don’t think it’s a sin.

Prof. EDGELL: It’s not so much that evangelical pastors or conservative Catholic pastors are coming out and saying, “Oh, divorce is fine and we don’t care about that.” They talk a lot about the human costs. They talk a lot about the pain. But what they’re not willing to do anymore is stigmatize. And I think you really see that reflected in the attitudes of people in local churches on these issues.

LAWTON: There have been big shifts for mainline Protestants as well. Once the bastion of traditional family life, many mainline churches are now widely accepting of alternative family situations. Yet mainline Protestants still have relatively large numbers of traditional families.

Prof. EDGELL: It is ironic that people who are involved in liberal religious communities have stable families, while their rhetoric often displaces family, or a traditional family, from the center of congregational life. Liberal Christians are very serious about the family, but that doesn’t mean that they think the family has to be in this Ozzie and Harriet mold.

LAWTON: Chris Johnson and his wife Kim Devine-Johnson are lifelong Lutherans who are raising their three children in the same tradition. They’ve been married 19 years and in many ways are a very traditional family, even as they describe their political and theological views as progressive. They reject what they see as patriarchal gender roles, and they teach their children to do the same.

KIM DEVINE-JOHNSON: When we were on vacation this summer, we had been in a restaurant, and we had held hands, and we did our prayer. And then afterwards as we were leaving, a man approached Amos and said, “Well now, young man, you should be really proud of your father for being the man who brings prayer to the table, keeps the family together.” And as we walked out Amos said, “What was that all about?”

Mr. JOHNSON: We certainly don’t buy into the notion that the father is supposed to be the head of the household, either in terms of faith life or any of the kinds of things that are important to a family. I think that we are very much a team.

LAWTON: For the Johnsons, the notion of family is wrapped up in the larger world around them.

Mr. JOHNSON: As a family, as a unit, as a partnership, we recognize that we play a role in the economy. And the choices we make impact the environment. And as a unit, what are we going to stand for in the world?

LAWTON: They have regular family devotions and try to help their children incorporate faith in every aspect of daily life.

Ms. JOHNSON: When we hear the ambulance, we stop what we’re doing to do a prayer for those people who are being helped — those people who are the helpers. We look at creation as though it is truly a gift from God. So part of what we do when we go on our walks is to bring a bag along and do our litter walks, because we’re helping to keep God’s creation in a good state.

LAWTON: Are you concerned about whether your kids end up embracing the faith that you have?

Ms. JOHNSON: If I was really honest with myself I would say, “Oh yes, I hope that they will always be of the Lutheran faith and be progressive in their thought.” And that is what I want for them.

Mr. JOHNSON: It is probably more important to me that they stay progressive than necessarily Lutheran.

LAWTON: Although Americans overall still oppose legalizing gay marriage, attitudes are more mixed about gay adoption. That pleases Arlene and Jacquie Ackerman, a lesbian couple in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They’ve been together 25 years and adopted 16-year-old Amanda when she was just 20 days old. But because of the laws at the time, only one of them, Arlene, was recognized as the legal parent.

JACQUIE ACKERMAN: Rather than giving up on being a family, we just did what we needed to do, and we have continued to do that.

LAWTON: They went ahead as parents. Jacquie changed her last name to match Arlene’s and then, when Pennsylvania laws changed two years ago, she officially adopted Amanda. She and Arlene say they are frustrated that the full legal benefits of marriage are not available to them.

Ms. J. ACKERMAN: We both feel strongly — I think all three of us do — that it should be recognized, that our union is as legitimate as the union of any two people who make an informed choice about being together and sharing their lives together.

LAWTON: Arlene and Jacquie say for the most part their neighbors in the conservative area have accepted them, even if they haven’t always understood the Ackermans’ family dynamics.

Ms. ARLENE ACKERMAN: We’ve never made a big to-do out of our relationship, but on the other hand, we’ve never hidden who we are.

Ms. J. ACKERMAN: And we have presented ourselves as if we’re okay, and so I think, by and large, people accept us as, “Gee, they’re okay.”

LAWTON: Amanda says she never lets other kids at school harass her for having two moms.

LAWTON: Arlene and Jacquie have brought Amanda up in the Metropolitan Community Church, a predominantly gay denomination where Arlene is a leader. They strongly disagree with the idea that God has only one plan for family.

Ms. A. ACKERMAN: For as much as the Christian church talks about the sanctity of marriage, you would think that scriptures would actually say what constitutes marriage in the Bible. And yet, nowhere in the Bible does it say what marriage is, or what the magic words are. There are all kinds of families represented throughout Scripture. I think the one value that I find consistent with Scripture is the value of love.

LAWTON: Religion continues to play a key role for traditional and nontraditional families alike.

UNIDENTIFIED PRIEST (At Baptism): In asking the Church to baptize your child, you’re taking on the responsibility of bringing him up in the practice of the faith …

LAWTON: Alfredo and Eileen Farias are Roman Catholics and the parents of four children, including a baby son, Christian, who was just baptized. They see marriage and the raising of their children as something holy.

EILEEN FARIAS: My task as a mother is to ultimately lead them to heaven.

Mr. FARIAS: I always ask myself, “How is it possible that God has been able to give me these creatures to take care of them, to lead them?” It’s an incredible task because these are eternal souls.

LAWTON: Both Eileen and Alfredo say they are trying to incorporate values they learned from their own families, such as reading at bedtime every night. Alfredo in particular is highly critical of divorce.

Mr. FARIAS: I don’t feel like, “Oh, you bad people.” I think, “How sad.” How sad because, in a way, especially if they were Catholic, in a way you have been given such an incredible gift, such an incredible bridge towards happiness, and you somehow lost it.

LAWTON: They believe contemporary American culture is often hostile to marriage and family, and they look to the Church to counter that.

Ms. FARIAS: You cannot be married alone in this culture or in this world. There’s just too many stressors and too many pressures on marriage.

Mr. FARIAS: But the biggest thing is, I think, the culture is really against marriage. The culture, whatever you see, I mean, the TV, the radio, everything, the portrayal of women — it’s just unbelievable.

LAWTON: Because family is fragile, they say, it needs to be carefully tended.

Ms. FARIAS: It’s a gift. And so when something is given to you, you take pleasure in it; you enjoy it, you take care of it.

LAWTON: The social and cultural changes are putting new pressures not only on families themselves but also on the religious congregations that are teaching and ministering in the midst of new realities.

Prof. AMMERMAN: I think you’ve seen a great deal of theological work going on in the last generation as all sorts of religious communities have been trying to figure out what it is they have in their traditions that can help them understand the family worlds that they are encountering today.

LAWTON: That theological work continues amid a growing gap between beliefs and behavior. And it will have a major impact on the future of faith — and family — in America.